The claim that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation emerged in the 1930s and remains central to American political culture today, even as its political resonances have shifted. This book ...
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The claim that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation emerged in the 1930s and remains central to American political culture today, even as its political resonances have shifted. This book offers the first comprehensive history of America’s Judeo-Christian discourse, from its nineteenth-century prehistory right up to the present. By examining the public debates around Judeo-Christian formulations of democracy and American national identity, the book reveals sharp disagreements between various groups of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers over church-state relations and religion’s place in a democratic polity more generally. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it shows, a host of commentators championed what the author calls “Judeo-Christian exceptionalism”: the argument that democracy rests on ethical and theological commitments shared by Jews and Christians. They used the pejorative term “secularism” to contend that denying the political centrality of the Judeo-Christian faiths—as did Christian and Jewish supporters of strict church-state separation, as well as skeptics and religious minorities outside the Judeo-Christian fold—would eradicate religion by completely secularizing American public life. In response, these pluralists insisted that democracy required tolerance of all beliefs, religious and otherwise. Their view made significant headway in the 1960s, as the Catholic Church embraced church-state separation and American liberals largely abandoned the “Judeo-Christian” label, even as a shorthand term for the country’s religious demography. Meanwhile, the emerging Christian right picked up the Judeo-Christian discourse and turned it toward the much more conservative ends that characterize its most visible uses today.Less

K. Healan Gaston

Published in print: 2019-11-15

The claim that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation emerged in the 1930s and remains central to American political culture today, even as its political resonances have shifted. This book offers the first comprehensive history of America’s Judeo-Christian discourse, from its nineteenth-century prehistory right up to the present. By examining the public debates around Judeo-Christian formulations of democracy and American national identity, the book reveals sharp disagreements between various groups of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers over church-state relations and religion’s place in a democratic polity more generally. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it shows, a host of commentators championed what the author calls “Judeo-Christian exceptionalism”: the argument that democracy rests on ethical and theological commitments shared by Jews and Christians. They used the pejorative term “secularism” to contend that denying the political centrality of the Judeo-Christian faiths—as did Christian and Jewish supporters of strict church-state separation, as well as skeptics and religious minorities outside the Judeo-Christian fold—would eradicate religion by completely secularizing American public life. In response, these pluralists insisted that democracy required tolerance of all beliefs, religious and otherwise. Their view made significant headway in the 1960s, as the Catholic Church embraced church-state separation and American liberals largely abandoned the “Judeo-Christian” label, even as a shorthand term for the country’s religious demography. Meanwhile, the emerging Christian right picked up the Judeo-Christian discourse and turned it toward the much more conservative ends that characterize its most visible uses today.

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